You Say Tomato

One Not-Particularly Angry Woman

For the next week I’ll be spending most of my “free” time at the movies (or watching tapes at home—since the festival lasts just a week and has four venues, it’s impossible to see all the eligible movies in the proper setting), since I’m on the features jury for the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which started last night.

Since filmmakers might come across this site (hey, it’s happened before), I’d better be circumspect about my opinions. However, I will say that the opening night film, Eating Out, was surprisingly good. “Surprising” could seem like a diss—and perhaps I did have relatively low explanations for a first movie that was made in just 10 days on a budget of $50,000—but mostly I mean that it managed to take a genre that’s become a tired cliché (the college sex comedy) and a plot line that’s just as played out (guy plays gay to win the girl) and produce a fresh, keep-‘em-guessing picture. A real crowd-pleaser.

The crowd was almost exclusively male—with the 800-seat Cinerama more than two-thirds full, I bet there were fewer than 50 women in the whole place—but even though it was a “men’s film,” there was nothing that would “put off” women viewers. In fact, it really is one of those gay films that’s fun for the whole family.

The Culture Gods Must Be Angry

I was in New York Friday to Wednesday, but I don’t have much by way of witty urban anecdotes to show for it. I spent a lot of time walking strange (to me) streets and discussing Brooklyn neighborhoods, and I didn’t get to enjoy a single scrap of culture (unless you include two episodes of Desperate Housewives and a very unsatisfactory Law & Order: Special Victims Unit watched on the hotel-room TV—and I don’t).

On Saturday, we returned to the Theater District in just enough time to discover that there was nothing worth spending money on left on the TKTS board. On Tuesday, my last night in the city, the tragedy was even greater. I popped out of the office around 3 and snagged tickets for that night’s performance of I Am My Own Wife—Tony, Pulitzer, only two more weeks in the run—and arrived, after having grabbed a speed-freak dinner, five minutes before curtain up … only to discover that the actor, Jefferson Mays, was unwell. This is one of those tour-de-force one-handers in which the performer moves between character, genders, and so much more at the drop of an eyelid, so you don’t want to see the understudy (apparently, there wasn’t one anyway) or the provincial tour. There was no time to get to anything else, so, determined to see something, I propelled R to the one movie theater I knew of within a five-block radius of where we stood. So intense was the gods’ desire that I remain un-entertained that we were barred from this too: Duran Duran were doing a personal appearance in the Times Square Virgin Megastore and the security was at presidential levels. You couldn’t even look down at the boys from Brum (well, at this point, the old geezers), much less even think about descending the escalator to go to the cinema. (Actually, it was pretty wacky—because of the security, potential customers were shut out of huge sections of the store. Doesn’t seem like very good business practice.)

Ah, but I did get to shake hands with music god Bob Hurwitz of Nonesuch. (See this NYT article, but feel free to skip the first three grafs, which are execrable.) I was all flummoxed like the time someone introduced me to a bullfighter, and that was just a picador—basically a fat guy with a long sharp pole and an armored horse.

Best Review of a Nobel-Prizewinner’s Book EVAH!

Amazon’s page for Nobel Literature Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s book Women as Lovers contains the following magnificent Publishers Weekly review:

This brief, pitiless novel advances such a narrow, bleak vision of the human race that one wonders why its author, who apparently finds everything pointless, saw the point in writing it. In oddly punctuated, repetitive prose reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's but lacking Stein's energetic compassion, Jelinek's (Lust and The Piano Teacher) latest doesn't have much good to say about love or marriage or sex or babies. And for Paula and Brigette, these are the only escapes from a life--if one can call it a life--of sewing bras in a factory in the mountains of Austria. It's hard to imagine even the pretense of love in a marriage to a drunken lout like Erich, the rotting apple of his sad, miserable parents' eye, or to fat and stupid Heinz. What shallow, covetous creatures women are, is what Jelinek seems to say. It doesn't matter if they don't enjoy sex; they don't deserve it, and anyway, someday we'll all be dead.

I can’t believe I’m the only person who’d never heard of Jelinek, so I’m sure there are lots of folks rapidly catching up on her by checking out Amazon’s listings. Not the best impression (though possibly faithful).

With the Mennonites

I’ve not had much time for blogging of late—and little inclination when I had the opportunity. Given how close we are to the election, it’s not surprising that it’s busy at work, and I’ve been traveling a lot recently. I haven’t even had time to watch much television—though as far as I know, they’ve not canceled any of “my” shows yet.

This weekend we went to the Mennonite Country Auction and Relief Sale in Ritzville, Wash. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mennonites—I’ve never met one that wasn’t sweet and huge-hearted. If it became compulsory to have a religious denomination [insert lame PATRIOT Act joke here], I’d go with Menno Simon’s peeps, though I’d no doubt have to undergo re-education to remove my martial streak.

As well as some awesome food (man, I can’t get enough kraut runza—I’ve had them every day since the sale—and New Year’s cookies are sinfully delicious), there's also a fund-raising auction. The folks I was with spent some serious money: Several of the quilts pictured on this page (including the postage stamp quilt) went home with members of my extended Mennonite family, and even I bought a comforter (much cheaper, because there’s no quilting, but the colors were great).

I also bought a turkey—I know the family that was donating it, and I felt bad that the bidding was in the cellar. As of today, it’s still running around in Eastern Washington; I get to decide whether to have it delivered live or butchered. I’m trying to persuade R that it would be a great gift for Sooky, to compensate for stifling her hunting instincts by making her live indoors, but so far she’s unconvinced.